Hafsah Dabiri
Ramadan can be an intense month for many Muslims around the world, as not only are we fasting more, but we are reading more, we may be awake for longer and we have much less energy to cope with work. During this time, we need the best pre-Ramadan productivity habits to keep our minds and bodies on track.
Here are 7 habits that can help you to get Ramadan ready!
1. Sleep and Wake Up Early
During the month of Ramadan, we want to be able to take advantage of the night time. And still be able to work and focus on our school and other commitments during the day.
REM sleep stands for Rapid Eye Movement sleep. This is a state “accompanied by low muscle tone throughout the body”.
REM sleep is an extremely important part of our sleep cycle. It allows the areas of the human brain that are used for learning and memory retention, to be maximised.
To be able to get REM sleep we have to sleep for longer. Sleeping and waking early can allow us to get the required amount of sleep needed to ensure pre-Ramadan productivity.
Tip: Try and implement the prophetic sunnahs of sleeping to increase the baraka in your snooze! Such as making your wudhu as part of your nighttime routine and sleeping on your right side.
2. Use Blue Light Glasses
Do you suffer from headaches and occasional blurred vision?
We all spend a significant amount of time on our computers, phones and watching TV. The average person spends 10 hours staring at a screen per day!
As a result of this, we are exposing our eyes to blue light. Blue Light has the potential to damage the light-sensitive cells in the retina. Blue light glasses protect your eyes from the harmful light emitted by your devices often helping with eye strain, headaches AND loss of sleep!
A great company that you’ve probably seen all over social media at the moment is ELAHVi.
They have a great range of really stylish glasses and all sensibly priced too. Be sure to get yours to help maximise your pre-Ramadan productivity.
3. Track your Day
Keep track of your day. In the evening, before you shut down your laptop and rest, organise a to-do list of important things you want to complete the next day.
This will allow you to prioritise and start the next day with a focus on what needs to get done. Plan your salah, breaks and lunches into your to-do list. Your tasks will seem more manageable and organised once you’ve written them on a piece of paper and will allow you to feel grounded.
Sometimes being able to tick off elements of your list, is all the motivation you need to stay on track, motivated and increase your pre-Ramadan productivity.
4. Turn Off your Social Media Notifications!
What? Disconnect?
Yes. Push notifications have been said to be one of the biggest distractions when it comes to productivity and deep focus.
A huge part of productivity is ‘flow’. This is a state with minimal distractions and deep focus.
“Hungarian-American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, coined the physiological state of “flow” back in 1975. He defined it as a state of deep immersion in a single task where the rest of the world seems to just slip away. McKinsey found that when executives are in flow, they are up to five times more productive.”
When we have limited time and energy, it is important to keep focused on the work that requires a lot more of our commitment.
Did you know that every time, we are distracted by our phones, not only do we lose the time that we spend checking the emails and tweets but we also lose 25 EXTRA minutes?
It takes an average of about 25 minutes (23 minutes and 15 seconds, to be exact) to return to the original task after an interruption. Push notifications stop your focus and stop your pre-Ramadan productivity.
5. Create Dedicated Spaces
If possible, create dedicated spaces. Ensure that you allocate one part of your room or space to sleep, one to work and one to worship.
Design your space in a way that allows you to be focused on a specific thing when you’re in a specific space. Do not allow work to flow into your sleeping space or sleep to flow into your space for worship.
Take time before Ramadan to make the most of these spaces. Invest in a nice prayer mat, get used to placing your phone away from your bed at night and organize your workspace in a way that works best for you.
6. Find Yourself an Accountability Partner to Help you Increase Your Pre-Ramadan Productivity
Ramadan is usually the time of the year where we set ourselves goals for how much we want to achieve during the month. These goals may be in terms of our faith and worshipping Allah but they also might be in disciplining ourselves to eat better or be more focused.
One of the best ways to ensure that you’re meeting your goals is to have an accountability partner or group. This person could be a friend or a family member who knows what your goals are and helps you keep on track.
You could both set regular times to check in with each other to make sure that you’re working on your goals, health, diet (whatever it is) before Ramadan begins and then be in the best place to continue that consistency into Ramadan.
7. Speak to Yourself Kindly
There will be moments of inconsistency and procrastination. We will never be able to be perfectly consistent. But we have to remember that those inconsistencies do not dictate who we are and what we are capable of.
Take a moment to reassess, refocus and get back up!
Do not label yourself as being unproductive or bad at building habits. You’re human and you are growing. Your internal dialogue affects your unconscious mind and negative self-talk can sometimes lead to even more inconsistency.
Here are 3 steps to help you transform your internal dialogue:
- Pause and reflect on what you’re actually saying to yourself and make a note of this.
- If the self-talk is negative, challenge it, make 70 excuses for yourself and give yourself the benefit of doubt.
- Reset and restart with some positive thoughts about what you’re capable of!
Which of these tips will you be implementing to help with your pre-Ramadan productivity? And do you have any others to share with us? Let us know in the comments!
